Trivia Recap – Almost Perfect at Brown’s

To my knowledge, it’s only happened once in Albany’s team trivia history. Only once has a team answered every question right, without using any of their skips or “double-chance” option plays. That was many years ago, when Stern Fans “went perfect” at the Arc sports bar in Watervliet.

In the five years I’ve played competitive bar trivia in the area, I’ve seen teams come close, but failed in the final question. I’ve had it happen to me. I’ve seen legendary teams like Lynch’s Mob and Surf Tulsa crash and burn on the final question, after hitting everything perfectly.

It’s like watching someone get close to a perfect 300 game in bowling – at least back in the day when it was harder to bowl a 300, before they souped up the bowling ball and short-oiled the lanes.

In the first quarter, Jeremy and Alexis and I were on fire. Jeremy knew the restaurant featured in the Talladega Nights movie (Applebee’s), I knew the actor who was the star of the 1930’s gangster picture The Public Enemy (James Cagney), and Alexis figured out the author who was sued for plagiarism in 2009 (JK Rowling). First round, we had a perfect 30 points and other teams had 18 points or worse.

In the second round – more of the same. The big one was hitting the double-bonus and knowing the two rappers that released albums entitled Rebirth and Battle of the Sexes (Lil Wayne and Ludacris). We also knew which NBA team played its home games at Ford Arena (the OKC Thunder). Perfect through ten questions.

Now comes crunch time. Question twelve – what sitcom was set at fictional Monroe High School in New York City? Back to deductive reasoning for me. I knew it wasn’t Welcome Back Kotter, in that show was based at James Buchanan High School in Brooklyn. So what other high school sitcom could it be – – when I wake up in the morning / And the alarm gives out a warning / And I don’t think I ever make it on time / By the time I grab my books / And I give myself a look / I’m at the corner just in time to see the bus fly by / it’s all right, cause I’m – no, wait, that’s Bayside High School in California. Wrong again.

Then I remembered, there was a sitcom in the late 1980’s early 1990’s, and maybe just maybe – I wrote down Head of the Class and handed up the slip.

It was indeed Head of the Class. Nailed it.

Then came question 13. What famous medal features an image of three naked men with their hands on each others’ shoulders?

Whaaaa?

The three of us looked at each other and groaned. We went through every medal we could think of – nothing sounded like that description. We guessed the Congressional Medal of Honor. It was the Nobel Peace Prize. We lost six points.

So much for the perfect game.

But we didn’t stop. We nailed the four states who intersect at Four Corners Point (Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico), and figured out what professional golfer was known as the Black Knight (Gary Player). By the final question, we had 154 points and a comfortable 30+ point lead over anyone else in the room.

The final question was on the topic of baseball legends.

With our perfect game blemished by missing the Nobel Peace Prize question, we decided to bet conservatively, using the trivia betting equation 2X-Y+1=Z, where “X” is the score of the second-place opponent, and “Y” is our score. You double the second-place team’s score, subtract your score, and add one point. That becomes your bet. If you get the answer right, you lock everyone else out. The drawback is that if you get it wrong, you have to hope a lot of other people get it wrong too.

“Babe Ruth played on how many World Series winning teams?”

Okay, now we had to remember – he played for several Boston Red Sox winners, and he was on several New York Yankees winners. We recalled that the Sox won in 1915, 1916 and 1918, and that he played for the Yankees World Series champions of 1923, they beat Pittsburgh in 1927, beat St. Louis in 1928, and beat Chicago in 1932 (the “called shot” series). We couldn’t remember if the Yankees had won any of the other series championships at the time, so we handed in our answer “7” and hoped for hte best.

And sure enough, the answer was “7”. Street Academy victory!

And if it weren’t for three naked men on a commemorative medal, we could have completely cleaned up that night and become the first team in ages to hit a perfect game in trivia.

Probably because there was a team that was 30 points behind us and we were still trying to win the game. Had we gotten that Nobel Peace Prize question, yeah sure we would have gone for everything. But that’s like someone pitching a no-hitter and coughing up a bloop single in the 8th; the manager’s going to take him out anyway because he still wants to win the game.